Today we spent the entire day working on our pitches which we are going to present to a panel of judges tomorrow. I chose to do mine on Cisco Duo which is a form of security offered by Cisco that is a cloud-based two-factor authentication. I also practiced my pitch once I had completed it and overall today was much more of a chill work at your own pace day.
-Matthew
Today we learned about Cisco’s in-house collaboration platform, WebEx. WebEx is very similar to zoom or Microsoft Teams because it allows Cisco employees to connect with each other and their clients. WebEx also includes the ability to chat with people through the application and allows for more efficient communication and collaboration between Cisco and their clients as well as internally. Today we also learned about what it means to be a SE at Cisco and what their day-to-day looks like. It was a good experience to learn what employees at Cisco do on a daily basis and how they use WebEx to further connect with their clients and improve their workflow.
– Matthew
Today we talked about the variety of different things that Cisco does for the security of its customers and the range of products they offer for network security. One thing that caught my attention today was the amount of proactive work that Talos, a division of Cisco dedicated to strengthening their security products, does so that they can find and patch weaknesses in their networks before they can be exploited. We also talked about how companies can use Cisco products reactively to find out how they were hacked and how far the hack spread so that they can more effectively and efficiently deal with it.
(Cisco’s SecureX dashboard which allows companies to monitor security events)
– Matthew
Today, we started off by talking with Justin Novielli about Cisco Meraki which is one of Cisco’s main products. It’s essentially Cisco’s method of controlling a network primarily through the cloud so that instead of working with a single part of the network at one time you can instead send out instructions to the entire network. This enables enterprises to be much more efficient when managing their network and allows for control of a network from far away, we were given an example of a network admin monitoring and making changes from their cell phone at the beach if they really wanted to.
The next thing we talked about was Cisco’s data centers, and we were given an overview as to what a data center is and how they work. Data centers are essentially the brain of a company, especially technology oriented ones as they are the primary place for information to flow into and out of for a company.
Finally, we had a demo on AppDynamics a company acquired by Cisco which allows software developers to see detailed analytics about their applications. The demo went through how to diagnose a problem within an application as well as demonstrated how AppDynamics could allow developers to dig deeper into their code and find exactly where the problem was. This allows for better efficiency when dealing with sudden crashes or shutdowns from an application which can save a company valuable amounts of time and therefore money as well.
Overall, today we went much deeper into what Cisco actually is and what products they offer as well as giving us a glimpse into what kinds of problems Cisco customers use them to solve.
– Matthew